15.06.13 i am a mighty sex god alan titchmarsh daddy’s (best in show) girl teen cyber the private bullies world of what goes on inside sofia coppola britain’s schools Sofia Coppola with her father in 1990. Opposite: with Emma Watson Her father is the legendary director, her husband is coppolacoppola a rock star, she is an Oscar-winning film-maker. Life seems so easy for Sofia Coppola. But in private, she tells TimTeeman, she has experienced the public failure of uncovereduncovered her first marriage and the death of her brother From left: with Marc Jacobs at New York Fashion Week in February; with second husband Thomas Mars, frontman of French band Phoenix left Sofia Coppola’s latest film, The Bling Ring, feeling deliriously happy about ‘It was really brutal. To be on the cover of a magazine being older and squarer than Coppola’s spoilt, vile characters. My mouth in a with the headline “She Ruined Her Dad’s Movie”’ sour, cat’s-bum pout, I tutted throughout the movie, a stylish drama about a group of Los Angeles teenagers who, in a sonorousness, given that everything The Bling at this year’s Met Ball (in 2002 she modelled free-wheeling spree between 2008 and Ring personifies – brattish acquisitiveness, as the “face” of his fragrance). She speaks I 2009, robbed the homes of celebrities wealth, a veneration of fame and notoriety in a listless monotone, with “That’s private” including Orlando Bloom, Lindsay – stands in opposition to her blue-chip such a favoured response she’d probably Lohan, Megan Fox and Paris Hilton, netting Hollywood lineage: her father is The Godfather use it if I asked how she felt about the $3 million worth of goods. They made sure and Apocalypse Now director Francis Ford weather. If her movies reflect an un-pin- their homes were empty by poring over the Coppola, her cousins include actors Nicolas down-ableness, they absolutely reflect gossip about their lives and, when finally Cage and Jason Schwartzman. Her aunt is their writer and director. arrested, relished their own celebrity. The film Talia Shire, most famous for playing Adrian Her own very un-Bling Ring-ish childhood makes you yearn to ride a bike, whooping Balboa, the much-suffering wife of Sylvester was spent not in Hollywood, but mostly a through the countryside, a million miles from Stallone’s Rocky, and Connie Corleone in The small town in the Napa Valley where her these vapid dunderheads. Godfather. But if Coppola, 42, is disgusted with father, who is also a winemaker, named a It’s beautiful to look at, like all Coppola’s the “Bling Ring” and all their ignominious wine after her, “which is fairly normal there”. films – think of the well-dressed aesthetics of tale embodies, her film has a funny way of The Sofia, the Coppola winery website states, The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation showing it. The clothes and cars the teenagers was “born from a celebration of love… Our – yet its moral heart is as elusive and faint steal and covet are lavishly evoked, their sparkling wine, as bright and effervescent as a will-o’-the-wisp, even though the Oscar- crimes a lark. However, Coppola insists The as the woman who inspired it, the charming winning Coppola said recently the teenagers Bling Ring, which premiered in May at the and stylish Sofia Rosé, along with the “summed up everything that I think is Cannes Film Festival, is a tabula rasa for us alluring Riesling, are a tribute to the romantic, l, getty images. ba declining in our culture… Kids are inundated to “imprint” our judgments on to. ebullient spirit of women everywhere.” ko with reality TV and tabloid culture so much In a restaurant in Greenwich Village, Perhaps she reserves this effervescence that this just seems normal… It just seems like New York, Coppola orders steak tartare and for family occasions only. this trash culture is becoming acceptable as asparagus. She is slight, beautiful, with wavy, Her town was “normal, middle-class ge: rex features, getty images pa mainstream culture.” bobbed hair, wearing a vintage green jacket suburban, where everyone knew each other. Coppola’s criticism has an added layer of by her friend Marc Jacobs, who was her date Nobody had a designer bag.” She is an only previous spread: this The Times Magazine 17 daughter, which means she gets on at Chanel under Karl Lagerfeld well with her male-dominated film (“I was intimidated and scared, crews, she says. “But I’ve always had but he was very friendly and close girlfriends and I have a big girlie kind”) and attended art school. side. I like beautiful flowers, clothes If The Bling Ring implies Coppola and romantic stories.” Jacobs and views the world of celebrity and Céline’s Phoebe Philo are her favourite fetishised high fashion with some designers. She and her girlfriends disdain, it should be noted that discuss cosmetics, although her beauty Coppola is a celebrated fashion regime isn’t “extreme, and plastic template herself, a waifish epitome of surgery doesn’t appeal to me”. She cool as lionised by fashion-watchers grew up wanting to be a magazine as their celebrity victims were by editor, loved reading The Face and the “Bling Ring”. There are many French Vogue – “very glamorous, my pictures of Coppola on Pinterest. She only link to the outside world” – and even helmed her own Japan-based became shyer and more self-conscious fashion label, Milkfed. as a teenager. Before directing, Coppola As a little girl, Coppola was a appeared in movies, mostly her “ham”, putting on shows for her father’s: “I’m more comfortable family and bossing other kids around; behind the camera. Being a her mother “traces a direct line” from performer is not my nature.” The that to her becoming a director. She critics agreed: she was panned for her had a privileged upbringing, but “I performance as Mary Corleone in appreciate and value things and don’t The Godfather Part III (1990), and take anything for granted. My dad named Worst Supporting Actress and always stressed that working hard Worst New Star at that year’s Golden was very important.” Coppola spent a Raspberry awards. “It was really lot of time on her father’s film sets: brutal. I was 18 and it was hard to her first acting role was as a baby be so put down. To be on the cover being christened in The Godfather of a magazine with the headline ‘She and, aged 3 on the set of The Ruined Her Dad’s Movie’ made me Godfather Part II, she had her own feel bad for embarrassing him. But director’s chair with her name on it. I wasn’t devastated. It wasn’t my As a seven-year-old, she entertained dream to be an actor.” She partied in herself during the fraught filming of Nineties Los Angeles. Was it a wild Apocalypse Now in the Philippines time? “I was never out of control; jungle by drawing elaborate pictures I never had a big drugs phase.” of palm trees and helicopters and Coppola’s first film, made in 1998, weaving the pictures together to form Lick the Star, was a 14-minute short. stories. She moved to New York as a teenager She then heard that an adaptation of Jeffrey during filming of The Cotton Club, taking ‘I wasn’t comfortable in Eugenides’s novel The Virgin Suicides was being yellow cabs “and being here when Madonna planned, a book she felt “very protective over was starting to be cool and she wasn’t in my first marriage. Yo u and the way they were planning to do it didn’t California yet”. Her father recalls her sitting sound right”. She took on the movie rights. Some on Andy Warhol’s lap. think it will make your accused her of nepotism. “I work really hard, but Then, when Coppola had just turned 15, I’m definitely lucky to have the connection with disaster struck. Her brother Gian-Carlo, then relationship something the industry I do. I knew how to get a good 22, was killed after being struck by a towline sound designer. I definitely had advantages but connecting two boats in an accident in else; it didn’t’ was disadvantaged too that people could dismiss to Maryland. Griffin O’Neal, son of Ryan O’Neal me.” She doesn’t feel a desperate need to counter ac def and at the time filming Gardens of Stone these charges. “You can’t please everybody. I just at directed by Coppola Sr, was piloting the boat granted. It was obviously a very sad time. get on with my work.” ge to pa both men were on and, it was reported, I was very close to him. Really close. It was The success of Lost in Translation (2003), mamo was trying to pass between the two boats definitely hard on our family. Somehow we with Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson as ya connected by the towline. O’Neal ducked to got through. I had therapy at the time. I was two lonely, dislocated souls in a hypnotic umi Tokyo, still shocks her. “I was writing a ay avoid it; Gian-Carlo suffered massive head pulled out of school. You’re in shock. I think it injuries. Subsequent reports said he had always stays with you. I still miss my brother really personal story about my experience been decapitated. O’Neal was convicted and it’s been more than 20 years.